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Summary
Amazon unveiled Vulcan, a warehouse robot with ‘a sense of touch,’ at an event in Germany.
Vulcan adds/removes items from pods using a camera-equipped arm with a suction cup.
Amazon says Vulcan is meant to supplement its human workforce.
Amazon unveiled a new warehouse robot at an event today in Dortmund, Germany (via The Verge). The company calls Vulcan, which uses a combination of sensors and onboard AI to gauge how to interact with Amazon’s vast inventory of products, “our first robot with a sense of touch.”
Amazon already uses a number of robots in its warehouses for various tasks. The company says that because it can tell the difference between different items and “understand when and how it makes contact with an object,” Vulcan has the potential to make the company’s fulfillment process even more efficient — that is, faster and less costly.
Vulcan is able to both add individual items to and remove items from the one-foot-square pods used to store inventory in Amazon warehouses. These pods typically hold 10 items each. Amazon says its other robots, which don’t exhibit as much dexterity as Vulcan, are ill-suited to this task.
To add items to bins, Vulcan uses a setup “that resembles a ruler stuck onto a hair straightener.” Using the “ruler,” Vulcan can push around items inside Amazon’s pods, while paddles with built-in conveyor belts hold and place the item being added.
When picking items, Vulcan uses an arm with a camera and a suction cup. The robot’s software evaluates the camera feed to find items and determine how best to pick them up, then the section cup grabs the item.
Amazon says the robot has the ability to pick up and move about 75 percent of the items stored in its warehouses, about as quickly as human workers can. It’s also able to determine when it can’t manipulate a given item and call for human help.
Related
‘Making our workers’ jobs easier’
Vulcan joins the more than 750,000 robots Amazon has deployed in its fulfillment centers since 2013. The company says that this has “created hundreds of new categories of jobs at Amazon, from robotic floor monitors to on-site reliability maintenance engineers,” though automation results in fewer positions overall.
Amazon is the second-largest private employer in the US, with the majority of its workers laboring in fulfillment centers. The company says Vulcan is meant to operate alongside human workers — Amazon’s director of applied science Aaron Parness says “the combination is better than either on their own.”
